This class began with the sad but painful truth: White people can not clap on beat. Eurotraditional music  typically features songs with emphasis on 1 and 3, while New World Beats feature emphasis on 2 and 4. According to the slides New World Beats also feature a third displaced beat and this swing beat has become a common characteristic of American sound. The theme of this class was displacement, ranging from the previously mentioned displaced beat to the “Great Migration”. The Great Migration refers to the gradual movement of Black Americans out of the “country”/south due to the disenfranchisement of this community in the 1890’s. This included but was not limited to spectacle lynchings (as featured on postcards), segregation, and discrimination. This racism inspired the migration to cities where Black Americans where they can vote, work a variety of jobs, organize, and have a (somewhat) safer existence. This migration also influenced “white flight” in many cities, where the white populations in these cities were uncomfortable with the increase of Black American populations so as technology progressed, suburban communities were built, and highways were constructed, these white populations fled to the suburbs.

The presence of Black Americans in major urban areas inspired the reemergence of “race records” which led to R&B or Rhythm and Blues. Musicians such as Bessie Smith grew in popularity because of their sound but still faced extreme discrimination in the public sphere, which ultimately impacted her death when she was in a car accident and the nearby hospital refused to treat a Black woman.

Another musician Professor O’Malley disused was McKinley Morganfield, better known as “Muddy Water” who was a man from the Storall Plantation in Mississippi. He started playing music at the plantation such as the song “Whatcha know Joe” (a song which transcended to jazz and then swing), and caught the eye of not only Leonard Chess of Chess Records but also folklorists John Work and Alan Lomax. He becomes famous due to his song “Hoochie Coochie Man”, which initially he recorded reluctantly because it was an exaggerated version of Southern culture, but it appealed to those who were displaced from the South, invoking nostalgia. The folklorists, particularly Alan Lomax, had conflicting views about where this song would go since they viewed Muddy Waters as untapped, genuine folk, while Muddy Waters saw this as an opportunity to make it big. Since the race records weren’t typically accessible to White Americans Chess records decided to export the Blues genre from Black Americans in America to White musicians in England, who then exported the music to White Americans back in America. This phenomenon relates back to the previous lecture of race commodification, since White Americans weren’t exposed to the Blues, a genre started by Black musicians, until it was delivered to the in a racially comfortable package, by other Whites. This continued to influence major musicians such as Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley and others, who give no recognition to their genre’s roots.